County borough is a term introduced in 1889 in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (excluding Scotland), to refer to a borough or a city independent of county council control. The Local Government Act 1972 abolished them in England and Wales, but they are still used in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The Local Government (Wales) Act 1994 re-introduced the term for certain "principal areas" in Wales. Scotland did not have county boroughs but instead counties of cities. These were abolished on 16 May 1975. All four Scottish cities of the time — Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, and Glasgow — were included in this category. There was an additional category of large burgh in the Scottish system, which were responsible for all services apart from police, education and fire.

Creation

When county councils were first created in 1889, it was decided that to let them have authority over large towns or cities would be impractical, and so any large incorporated place would have the right to be a county borough, and thus independent from the administrative county it would otherwise come under. Originally 10 county boroughs were proposed, but the Local Government Act 1888 as eventually passed created 61 in England, and two in Wales. (The ten in question were Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Hull, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne, Nottingham and Sheffield.)

Initially, a town had to have a population of over 50,000 to apply to be made a county borough. The granting of county borough status was a subject of much argument between the large municipal boroughs and the county councils. Additionally, county borough borders were tightly constrained because of county council reluctance to give up their tax base. Several exceptions were allowed: mainly for historic county towns: Bath, Canterbury, Chester, Dudley, Gloucester, Oxford and Worcester were all under the 50,000 limit in the 1901 census (Canterbury even under 25,000). Various new county boroughs were constituted in the following decades as more boroughs reached the 50,000 minimum and then promoted Acts to constitute them county boroughs. County boroughs to be constituted in this era were a mixed bag, including some towns that would continue to expand such as Bournemouth and Southend-on-Sea. Other towns such as Burton upon Trent and Dewsbury were not to not increase in population much past 50,000.

1913 saw the attempts of Luton and Cambridge to gain county borough status defeated in the House of Commons, despite the approval of the Local Government Board  the removal of Cambridge from Cambridgeshire would have reduced the income of Cambridgeshire County Council by over half.

Slowdown

Upon recommendation of a commission chaired by the Earl of Onslow, the population threshold was raised to 75,000 in 1926, by the Local Government (County Boroughs and Adjustments) Act 1926, which also made it much harder to expand boundaries. The threshold was raised to 100,000 by the Local Government Act 1958.